#WOW2021 week 22: Can You Structure the Unstructured?

Data analyst is supposedly the sexiest job of the 21st century.  Most people think that we spend our time building amazing models, visualizations, or insights all day.  What they don’t know is that you spend nearly most of your time cleaning data.  Some data is nice and refined (aka usable) and other data needs a lot of TLC and an exorcism.  

I’ve increasingly found myself grabbing data from websites and that can definitely be the wild, wild west of data.  Standard naming conventions…on what planet?  Standard anything is a pipe dream.  So, what do you do if you need to standardize some data to get stuff done?  You could, of course, write lines and lines of code or, yikes, do a million replace calcs.  

Hint: I am a REGULAR girl using data as my EXPRESSION to the world. 

After 13 years in the data space – I never needed it…until I did.  Record scratch, stop the music.  It sometimes feels like you’re going to the dark side of the moon, but knowing how to whip unstructured text into shape can save you a lot of data sadness.  

In this week’s challenge, we’ll explore AirBNB data and find what the price spread is of listings in Seattle by the number of bedrooms in the listing.